In recent months Canadians have watched in amazement and excitement
as workers renegotiated their place in eastern European societies.
Where will it all end?

Hardly anyone seems as interested in workers' future in
Canada. Labour legislation has been under attack. Collective
agreements have been gutted. Public-sector unions have been clobbered.
The "safety net" of social security has been steadily
weakened. Where will it all end?

When in doubt, head for your television set. And, like good
Canadians, turn on the news. There are only two channels.

It is May Day 1999.

CHANNEL

ONE

Good evening.

Prime Minister Peter Pocklington today extended martial law over
six more towns and cities in western Canada, bringing to 37 the number
of municipalities occupied by troops.

"The rioting and looting must stop," he announced from
the government bunker in the Gatineau Hills.

Meanwhile, the Guerilla Army of Unemployed Youth expanded its
operations throughout the rural areas of Quebec and continued raids into
suburban communities. In the same pattern they have followed in recent
weeks, the guerillas seized dozens more shopping centres, which served
as bases for raids on local fast-food outlets to demand jobs.

Exact figures are difficult to obtain, but the body count of
industrialists who have been roasted alive by the guerillas is now
running close to 300.

The violence erupted three months ago, when government statistics
indicated that 95 per cent of those under the age of 25 were unemployed.
The jobless rate for 26-to-40-year-olds remains at the less alarming
level of 72 per cent.

The mayors and councillors of 17 more southern Ontario
municipalities today submitted their resignation, as the economic crises
deepens in that region. Like the 120 other communities that recently
suffered the same shock, these towns are the sites of abandoned
factories that have not operated since shortly after the arrival of free
trade in 1989.

"We can't go on," said one old political warhorse,
Mayor William G. Davis of Brampton, as he packed his family's
belongings in his Winnebego and joined the long caravans headed for the
new industrial heartland in the American Southwest.

The refugee camps that sprang up in several southern states in the
early 1990s have turned into festering communities of crime, disease,
and unemployment for the many Canadians who have made the trek in recent
years.

The Minister of Optimistic Thinking, Wayne Gretsky, predicted today
that more jobs are on the way, and that the government's new
job-creation programs would soon bring the unemployment level down below
the 70 per cent mark. He rejected the arguments of opposition critic
Justin Trudeau that any figure over 40 per cent was unacceptable.

"Canadians gotta learn to tighten their belts," Gretsky
insisted. "They gotta learn to share the remaining jobs to help
maintain national productivity."

The Economic Council of Canada has determined that 40 per cent is
now relatively full employment in a post-industrial society.

Labour will take less! The Canadian Labour Congress today
announced its agreement to the terms demanded by the Business Council on
National Issues in the opening round of national negotiations for wage
decreases.

In the eight years since these national negotiations began,
agreement between the parties has been getting increasingly easier.
This time the CLC agreed to the 50 per cent wage cut without protest.

"We agree with the chairman of the BCNI that there must be
sacrifices for the national good," explained CLC vice-president
Sinclair Stevens.

The new agreement will give the average worker a take-home pay of
$1.37 per week.

"That's what they earn in Malaysia or Nigeria,"
Stevens noted, "and we have to keep up with the international
competition."

The Canadian Labour Congress membership took another nose-dive this
month, as eleven more unions dissolved. There are now only five left in
existence with a combined membership of 1,837.

The largest remaining union is the Federation of Superannuated
Politicians and Patronage Pullers, whose leader, John Turner, was
recently chosen CLC president. President Turner was unavailable for
comment, as he was immersed in his daily session with the National
Centre for Productivity Improvement and Capitalist Regeneration.

The congress has been disintegrating since the national general
strike of 1993, when every worker in the country was fired and only
rehired on condition that he or she stay away from unions and join a
Quality Circle instead.

Some 7,500 union officials were arrested at that time, and several
hundred were shot for violating the new laws against anti-productivity
protests. The remainder are still interned near Tuktoyatuk.

Premier William Vander Zalm has said no. Residents in the vicinity
of British Columbia's lumber mills have been swamping the
premier's office with petitions complaining about the stench from
the rotting fingers, hands, arms, and other parts of the human anatomy
that have been piling up outside the mills since deregulation of
industry's health and safety programs five years ago. The premier
refised to take any action, arguing that the government had to
"stay off the backs of the people."

"We must be wary of cutting into productivity increases by
making unreasonable demands on industry," he insisted from the
premier's new office in Hawaii.

He also noted that he had recently mentioned the subject to the
president of MacMillan-Bloedel during a Bermuda holiday and expected the
industry to begin piling more sawdust on the heaps of rotting flesh.

Panic broke out this afternoon in Toronto's financial district
when a group of humans was found wandering through a downtown office.
The last human worker was released from office work in 1995, and a
federal decree late that year forbade any humans to re-enter.

The mechanical monitors quickly discovered that today's
intruders were simply a family of Japanese tourists who had become lost
after touring Toronto's new Museum of Microtechnology. They were
quickly escorted back to the street by armed security robots.

The National Union of Robots today won the right to educational
leave for retraining. Spokesman for the union, R2D2 Mark 8, indicated
that many of its members were only fourth generation machines and needed
upgrading to match the new thirteenth generation that is now on the
market.

Mark 8, the first robot to win a seat in the Canadian Parliament,
spearheaded negotiations with the Business Council on National Issues,
which has previously been unwilling to grant any leave for robots.

"These little mechanical midgets cost us $8.50 a piece,"
one manufacturer was heard to mutter on the first day of
negotiations," and I see no reason why we should have to suffer any
further losses in productivity by giving them more time off the job. It
was bad enough when they demanded three lubrication breaks every 24
hours."

The 750,000-machine union held celebrations throughout the country,
and oil cans were heard clinking well into the night.

Workers are getting more religious, according to the federal
Minister of Cleanliness and Godliness, Oral Roberts.

Roberts was commenting on his new "Prayers in the
Workplace" program, which was six months old today. Under the new
Work Prayers Act, workers and supervisors are required to begin each
working day with a Bible reading and silent prayer.

"Workers are more productive if they start the day with a chat
with God," Robert claimed." And they are learning to
co-operate with their foremen, who are also Christians after all."

His department staff has assured the minister that the widespread
singing of lewd songs to drown out the Bible readings that initially
greeted the new religious program has largely died out.

The former television evangelist was sworn into office last year,
following the merging of Canadian and American Citizenships under the
latest free-trade pact.

Finally, a human interest story. Canadian women now seem to have
been won over to the Stay-At-Home Campaign that the federal government
initiated in 1992, with the assistance of the Business Council on
National Issues.

A survey conducted by Statistics Canada has found that fully 98 per
cent of adult women have left the full-time work force and returned to
the family home. The remaining 2 per cent will be released from their
jobs next fall when the final phase of the defeminization legislation
comes into effect.

The closing of day-care centres, the banning of feminist
literature, and the advertising by the Mom-Belongs-in-the-Home Movement
have effectively destroyed Canadian women's push for full equality
in the labour market, which was so threatening to national productivity
in the 1970s and 1980s.

And that's the news. Good night, and have a productive
tomorrow.

CHANNEL

TWO

Good evening.

The federal Minister of Fun and Frivolity, Michael J. Fox, today
announced the government's plans to reduce the working week from 20
to 15 hours without a cut in income.

"Our surveys of productivity increases indicate that the new
technology introduced since 1995 has made it possible to reduce the
workloads of all working people without their suffering any reduction in
wages or salaries," he announced.

"We are confident that Canadians will now be able to
participate even more fully in the MDP," he added.

The MDP, of course, is the "Mass Decision-Making
Process," which was introduced when the Coalition of Workers'
Movements first began to take power at the provincial level in the early
1990s. All citizens are now involved in major decisions that were once
left to businessmen, bureaucrats, and politicians.

The first detailed MDP survey released earlier this year indicates
that the workers councils, consumers committees, and community
development bodies have been able to reach decisions that are much more
satisfactory and acceptable to the mass of the population than the
older, hierarchical, undemocratic processes.

"And there's still lots of time left for fun," Fox
shouted, as he tossed daffodils over the heads of reporters and
disappeared down Parliament Hill on his skateboard.

Shorter hours have been bringing a vast improvement in child care,
according to the federal Minister of Proud Parenthood, Ben Johnson. Not
only have the hundreds of new daycare centres opened in the past few
years given parents more time to themselves, but the reduction of
working hours has allowed parents to help out at the centres.

"Playing with kids is a whole lot more fun than pumping
iron," Johnson explained in his regular weekly press conference
held in the new Ottawa Children's Club at 24 Sussex Dr.

Spring brings tulips and daffodils, but also the annual job
rotation. Many Canadians have been eagerly counting the days till the
new job allocations are announced. Across the country workers have
applied to move on to new jobs, especially those who have complete their
two-year term in dirty, unpleasant Category 9 occupations, popularly
known as the "Stinkers."

"I would never have believed it myself, but absenteeism has
almost completely disappeared, and sabotage is a thing of the
past," said the Secretary of State for Occupational Recycling,
Maureen MacTeer. "I was skeptical when the program was introduced
in 1993, but it has been successful beyond my wildest dreams."

MacTeer's own recent job rotation has included being a
computer programmer, a janitor, an accountant, a dishwasher, and a rock
star.

Tomorrow will see the re-opening of the national Congress of
Industry and Culture in the old Senate Chamber in Ottawa. Congress
members have spent the past two months in consultative meetings with
unions, professional associations, and consumer groups across the
country, in order to plan social policy for the coming year.

In two weeks the Congress' committees will begin their regular
series of meetings with their counterparts in the Chamber of Popular
Power (formerly the House of Commons).

In the six years since the abolition of the Senate and the creation
of the Congress, the new parliamentary system has been working quite
successfully in co-ordinating the social planning carried on at the
local level across the country.

The President of Parliament, Robert White, will be reading the
speech outlining the priorities for the Congress' new legislative
session. High on the list of priorities will be revisions to the
Criminal Code that will make negligence in protecting workers from
occupational diseases a criminal offense punishable with up to twenty
years imprisonment.

"We'll throw away the keys," cried President White
as he clenched his fist and flashed his smile for tourists on Parliament
Hill.

International negotiations at the Hague today reached a new
consensus on the decentralization of production and international
sharing of investment funds. Since the dismantling of the last
multinational corporations late last year, world leaders have been
smoothly working out new terms of international trade, which reduce
competitiveness between regional blocs without harming local industry.

Canadian ambassadors Ed Mirvish and Pat Pattison were photographed
dancing round a May Pole with other delegates to celebrate the new
accord.

"All we need is love," exclaimed the aging ambassadors,
who are remembered as the capitalists who inaugurated the
"Give-Your-Business-Back-to-Your-Workers" campaign of the
early 1990s.

York University today announced that its Faculty of Administrative
Studies had been boarded up, in compliance with the decision of the
Congress of Industry and Culture last spring to end the traditional
training of managerial staff. The Congress' new program emphasizes
rotation of managerial positions and the development of co-operative
leadership skills that are not being taught in the public school system.

Meanwhile, the retraining program for old-style managers continues
in Sudbury, Ontario, where former supervisors are put to work in nickel
mines for six weeks. A recent graduate of the program, Conrad Black,
who was once a powerful figure in Canadian industry, was interviewed
this week on his new job in the Hamilton garbage collection department.

"I had no idea that workers were such a great bunch of
guys," he exclaimed. "I've learned a lot more from them
than I ever learned on Bay St."

The national Quality Control Program made a great stride forward
today. Workers' councils from Ontario's automobile industry
today concluded its long series of consultations with representatives of
the province's 4,500 consumers' committees.

This round of discussions will probably clean out the last vestiges
of planned obsolescence in the industry, just as it has done in the
electrical parts industry, where the 25-year light bulb was recently
unveiled. It is expected that the new automobiles produced by the
province's auto plants will last from 30 to 50 years.

Minister of Consumer Happiness k.d. lang is expected to release the
results of similar consultations in the clothing and shoe sectors next
week.

"Workers are happier making reliable products," lang told
reporters. "Now, if I could just get someone to write me a song
that wouldn't wear out."

Good news for consumers! The Ministry of Good Living revealed
today that inflation had slowed once again to 1.2 per cent.

"The controls on rents, land speculation, interest rates, and
food prices have stopped the upward pressure on wages," the
minister, John Candy, explained today. He also announced his own
resignation.

"Things are so stable on the prices front that there's no
fun left this job," he said sadly.

And that's the news. This is my last broadcast on this
program. Tomorrow I will be moving to my new job delivering pizza.
Your new newscaster will be Yolanda Ballard, who has just returned from
digging potatoes in Prince Edward Island.

Good night, and have a happy tomorrow.

Craig Heron is a labour historian at York University. His latest
book is The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short Story (Toronto; James
Lorimeter 1989).

COPYRIGHT 1991 Canadian Dimension Publication, Ltd.
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.